The release of the Netflix show Adolescence in March 2025 presented a bone-chilling and undeniable message: Our boys are in trouble.
Parents, educators, therapists, and experts have identified a laundry list of potential culprits: violent video games, social media echo chambers, toxic influencers, pornography, absentee fathers, and more.
Blogs, op-eds, and newspaper articles are all posing the same questions:
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Is social media ruining the lives of an entire generation?
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Is our technology making us more disconnected, disembodied, and disoriented?
As a sexologist, I see another important contributor to this phenomenon that is rarely discussed or acknowledged when we talk about men and boys: the crippling experience of sexual shame.
It’s noteworthy to point out that formal studies of sexual shame in men only started emerging around the 2010s. In an article published in 2018, Aqualus Gordon at the University of Central Missouri explained that men feel shame around a number of factors related to their sexuality, including how much they masturbate or watch pornography, whether they are sexually experienced enough, or skilled enough lovers, and whether their bodies are desirable. Sexual shame in men, Gordon warns, is linked to severe psychological distress, including depression, addiction, sexual dysfunction, and social isolation.
Scholars of sexual shame say men are as susceptible to shame as women are, and in some ways more. Why? Because men are not “guaranteed” masculinity at puberty, researchers hypothesize. They have to continue to earn it.
If that is the case, what do young men and boys believe they have to do to earn this coveted masculinity card?
The Role of Sexual Shame in Violence
As a researcher, I interview people from around the world to learn about their sexuality, past and present. In a highly illuminating conversation, one male interviewee shared with me how young men in his community talk about sex with women, regularly using terms like “crush,” “hurt,” and “tear her up.” This is not necessarily news to us, but we’ve become so desensitized to this language that we ignore how appallingly violent it is.
Yet boys in many parts of the world receive messages like, “If you bang your woman hard, you’re a real man.” This link between sexual shame and sexual aggression is found in academic literature as well. In 2014, researchers Mescher and Rudman published a study revealing that men feel shame when they internalize and believe they fall short of commonly accepted masculine body ideals around things like height, muscularity or leanness. They explain that men who are high on such body shame (a factor that correlates highly with sexual shame) tend to be more hostile, to react to rejection more negatively and to be more prone to violence toward women and rape proclivity, defined as “the self-reported likelihood that a man would commit a sexually aggressive act, like forcing sex, under certain hypothetical conditions, especially if he were assured that there would be no consequences.” It appears that when some men feel threatened or rejected due a perceived inadequacy around their masculinity or physicality, they may resort to sexual aggression as a maladaptive way to exert power, the authors suggest.
Sure enough, as Adolescence progresses, we get a glimpse into the protagonist Jamie’s struggles with his perceptions of his own inadequacy.
To be clear: I am not justifying violence toward anyone because someone feels unloved or undesired, nor I am suggesting that sexual shame is the only reason some men act out violently. I am pointing out, however, that we have a scientifically-proven correlation between feelings of inadequacy and sexual aggression in some boys and men that is worth considering and exploring as we try to unpack how to make our communities safer and more nurturing for all of their members.
Is Technology to Blame?
In a recent post on AI companionship, I made the claim that the worse your human relationships, and the better your technology, the more likely you are to form an addictive and potentially harmful bond with your device/app/chatbot.
When it comes to boys, technology, and what I’m now calling “The Adolescence Effect,” I believe this correlation also applies.
Those who have pointed out that lonely, maladapted men have always been prone to extreme and antisocial behaviors, and so this is not a new pattern, are right. But the risk here is more elevated because while our technology becomes more sophisticated, pervasive, and ubiquitous, our human relationships may have just gotten worse.
Adolescence Essential Reads
If you are a 14-year-old boy who has been bullied, rejected, or made to feel not masculine enough, with no safe and trusted avenues to process these emotions, where will you go when you pick up your smartphone? Wherever that child chooses to go, algorithms will reinforce that direction, in spades.
The Man in the Mirror
Being desired and being rejected is part of the gamut of human relationships, but if we shy away from these conversations and from modeling healthy relationships to our children, they will find a way to fill the void. In today’s digital age, they will turn to their technological tools for information and validation.
On the other hand, if we offer our boys strong and unconditional social support and communities and safe and open environments in which to learn to accept and express themselves, and also demand of them social accountability and responsibility, then, research suggests, they will be better inoculated against anti-social influences, both online and off.
Another one of my male interviewees made the poignant observation that the only opportunity boys have for intimacy is sex, and therefore many of them engage in sexual behaviors before they are emotionally ready. Are we willing to offer them other opportunities for intimacy without calling them weak or soft? This shift requires a level of self-reflection and vulnerability I am not sure we have the stomach for as a society. But as Adolescence shows us, we may have no choice.
Japanese roboticist and philosophical engineer Hiroshi Ishiguro has said, “We see ourselves in the mirror of the machines we can build.”
If we don’t like what’s being reflected back, we have to change it, one mirror at a time.
